May 20, 2013

What a Billion Muslims Really Think • The Modern German Economic Miracle Is a Myth

$2.95

www.TheNewAmerican.com ThaT Freedom Shall NoT PeriSh

Secretly tradingAway Our Independence

President Obama spoke at Planned Parenthood’s annual gala April 26, using the platform to affirm his continued support of the abortion giant while attacking states that have worked to pro-tect the unborn and their mothers by passing legislation to defund Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.

Significantly, Obama is the first sitting president to address the so-called “family planning” organization. Just as significant is the fact that nowhere in Obama’s lengthy speech could he bring himself to utter the word “abortion,” although Planned Parenthood is responsible for 40 percent of the abortions per-formed in the United States, and abortion makes up a significant portion of its revenue stream.

The president noted that “somewhere there’s a young woman starting a career who, because of you, is able to decide for herself when she wants to start a family.” By which he meant that Planned Parenthood has been only too willing to kill the pre-born babies of countless women who decided that, for whatever reason, a baby would be an unnecessary inconvenience.

Ridiculing the over 40 states where lawmakers have introduced or passed laws to protect the unborn, Obama quipped to the supportive chuckles of the audience: “When you read about these laws you want to check the calendar. You want to make sure you’re still living in 2013. Forty years after the Supreme Court affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to privacy, including the right to choose, we shouldn’t have to remind people that when it comes to a woman’s health, no politician should get to decide what’s best for you.”

Reaffirming his commitment to protect the abortion giant, which ponied up some $15 million in its efforts to help re-elect Obama in 2012, the president concluded his speech with the declaration that if he, his attorney general, and a core of federal judges get their way, “Planned Parenthood is not going anywhere. It’s not going anywhere today. It’s not going anywhere tomorrow.”

After the president’s patronizing address, Planned Parent-hood’s head, Cecile Richards, returned the favor, saying that “President Obama has done more than any president in history for women’s health and rights” — even while she conceded that Planned Parenthood faces “unprecedented attacks” from states that have grown tired of pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffers of the abortion business.

obama addresses planned parenthood, Condemns pro-life Efforts

Europol, the burgeoning police and intelligence agency of the European Union (EU), appears to be getting ready to extend its reach into the United States in new ways, as part of the Transat-lantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being promoted by President Obama and a powerful coalition of Wall Street one-worlders and globalist corporate executives.

On April 16, the Delegation of the European Union to the United States and Europol welcomed more than 140 members of the U.S. and European law-enforcement communities for an in-depth discussion of transatlantic cooperation on law en-forcement in Washington, D.C. According to the EU delega-tion’s press release on the event, the conference topics included “cyber crime, terrorism, and crimes related to intellectual prop-erty rights.”

“As globalization intensifies, we have to recognize that crime has also become increasingly multinational, multifac-eted, innovative and disruptive, and not in a good way,” EU Ambassador to the United States João Vale de Almeida said during his introduction. “The onus is on us, the EU and the U.S., public and law enforcement officials, to ensure that as

we prepare to deepen our economic ties, we adapt effectively to this transformation. We also need to consider how to align our law enforcement resources to ensure that as we open up the opportunity for businesses and working families, we also keep criminal interests in check.”

Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Jane Holl Lute re-inforced the EU-U.S. convergence theme. She said, “Working together, we have already begun to see how we can transform the way in which we protect our nations, and our citizens, against the shared threats that we face. Whether those threats are from terrorists, cyber criminals, or those who seek to steal intellectual property … the cooperation between our law enforcement agen-cies, governments, and our nations have never been stronger, and its impact has never been greater.”

The sparse reportage of this important development in EU-U.S. relations left unmentioned the fact that Europol, like so many of the EU’s institutions, has incrementally taken on in-creased powers, with the European Commission always citing some crisis or exigency allegedly requiring more centralized police authority.

beginning of an Eu-u.s. police merger?

Inside Track

www.TheNewAmerican.com 7

AP

Imag

es

by William F. Jasper

During the 2012 presidential cam-paign, Republican challenger Mitt Romney attacked President

Obama on trade issues, charging that Obama “has not signed one new free-trade

agreement in the past four years.” “I’ll re-verse that failure,” Romney pledged.

Romney’s charge was at once both true and misleading. President Obama had not signed any “new” trade agreements; how-ever, he did win congressional approval for, and signed, trade agreements with

Colombia, Panama, and South Korea that had been negotiated by the Bush admin-istration. Moreover, he has continued the efforts of the Clinton and Bush adminis-trations to create a Trans-Pacific Partner-ship (TPP) and a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

President Obama is pushing two trade pacts leading to economic and political integration of the United States with the European Union and Pacific Rim nations.

SecReTly TRadingAway Our Independence

THE NEW AMERICAN • MAy 20, 201310

globalism

The TPP and TTIP should be of special concern to Americans, since, as we shall detail presently, the authors and promoters of these agreements admit that they deal with far more than trade and have been designed to drag the United States into “regional governance” on a host of issues. The architects of the TPP and TTIP are vir-tually unanimous in their head-over-heels praise of, and support for, the political and economic merger taking place in the Euro-pean Union (EU). The once-sovereign na-tions of Europe have been tricked, bribed, and browbeaten into yielding control over almost every aspect of their lives to global-ist banking and corporate elites and their bureaucratic servitors in Brussels. The national governments, legislatures, and courts in the European Union are becom-ing mere administrative units of the unac-countable rulers of the increasingly tyran-nical EU central government.

During a visit to London in 2000, for-mer Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev referred to the increasingly authoritarian European Union as “the new European Soviet.” He was not being critical, mind you, but merely offering a startlingly can-did observation about the EU “project,” of which he has been — and remains — an enthusiastic booster. Gorbachev, a thor-oughly committed one-worlder, famously argued for expanding the EU into a “com-mon European home” that would include Russia and its former Soviet satellites.

Vladimir Bukovsky, the famous Rus-sian dissident, author, neurophysiologist, and survivor of Soviet prisons, psychiatric

prisons, and labor camps, has delivered a credible indictment of the absolutism and repression that are becoming the hallmark of EU governance. In a speech in Brussels in 2006 sponsored by the United Kingdom Independence Party, Bukovsky called the EU a “monster” that must be dismantled before it becomes a full-fledged dictator-ship like the Soviet system he had fought. He compared the European Parliament to the Supreme Soviet, the faux legislative body that merely served as a rubber stamp for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and compared the EU’s socialist central planning to Gosplan, the Russian acronym for the State Committee for Plan-ning, which drew up the Soviet Union’s infamous Five-year Plans for the National Economy. Bukovsky charged:

It is no accident that the European Parliament, for example, reminds me of the Supreme Soviet. It looks like the Supreme Soviet because it was designed like it. Similarly, when you look at the European Commission it looks like the Politburo. I mean it does so exactly, except for the fact that the Commis-sion now has 25 members and the Politburo usually had 13 or 15 members. Apart from that they are exactly the same, unac-countable to anyone, not directly elected by anyone at all. When you look into

all this bizarre activity of the Euro-pean Union with its 80,000 pages of regulations it looks like Gosplan. We used to have an organisation which was planning everything in the econ-omy, to the last nut and bolt, five years in advance. Exactly the same thing is happening in the EU. When you look at the type of EU corrup-tion, it is exactly the Soviet type of corruption, going from top to bottom rather than going from bottom to top.

Bukovsky, who has lived in Cambridge, England, since the late 1970s, continued:

If you go through all the structures and features of this emerging Euro-pean monster you will notice that it more and more resembles the So-viet Union. Of course, it is a milder version of the Soviet Union. Please, do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that it has a Gulag. It has no KGB — not yet — but I am very carefully watching such structures as Europol for example. That really worries me a lot because this organ-isation will probably have powers bigger than those of the KGB. They will have diplomatic immunity. Can you imagine a KGB with diplomatic immunity? They will have to police us on 32 kinds of crimes — two of which are particularly worrying, one is called racism, another is called xe-nophobia. No criminal court on earth

AP

Imag

es

Transatlantic set up: President Barack Obama is flanked by European Council President Herman Van Rompuy (left) and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso at a November 28, 2011 White House press conference on U.S.-EU Transatlantic relations.

www.TheNewAmerican.com 11

The fact is that the EU began as an economic and trade pact that, over the course of six decades, morphed into a full-blown supranational government that is now in the process of wiping out the few remaining vestiges of national sovereignty of its member states.

defines anything like this as a crime. So it is a new crime, and we have al-ready been warned. Someone from the British government told us that those who object to uncontrolled im-migration from the Third World will be regarded as racist and those who oppose further European integration will be regarded as xenophobes.

Bukovsky is not alone in recognizing the increasingly despotic nature and rampant corruption of the EU system. Nigel Far-age, a member of the European Parlia-ment, regularly exposes the same in his speeches and on his website, as do many other Euroskeptic politicians, journalists, and whistleblowers.

The fact is that the EU began as an eco-nomic and trade pact that, over the course of six decades, morphed into a full-blown supranational government that is now in the process of wiping out the few remain-ing vestiges of national sovereignty of its member states. And what is important to

note is the blatant lying and deception that has been es-sential to each advance of the EU project along these lines. At each crucial step, when critics objected that a new set of EU powers would lead to destruction of national sov-ereignty and independence, the EU prop agandists would assure the contrary and insist that “economic integration,”

“harmonization,” and “convergence” posed no threat to national sovereignty, tradition, and local rule. Those assurances have now been proven completely false.

Because the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is an agreement with an already existing transnational su-perstate — the EU — and because most of the key TTIP promoters have already enthusiastically embraced the EU ideas of integration, harmonization, and con-vergence, it is probably the more danger-ous of the two agreements, although the Trans-Pacific Partnership may be coming up earlier for a vote in the U.S. Congress.

obama Turns to “Trade”Compared to his two immediate prede-cessors, who both used brutal “ground and pound” methods to force trade pacts through Congress, Obama may seem to have been somewhat negligent of trade is-sues. The Clinton administration negotiat-ed more than 200 bilateral and multilateral trade agreements, including a major one

with Communist China, as well as pushing the hugely controversial North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress and winning approval for the equally contentious issue of U.S. mem-bership in the World Trade Organization. The George W. Bush administration, most notably, won approval for a Central Amer-ican Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) but failed to win passage of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) to create an EU-style project for the Western Hemi-sphere. He also failed to enact the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a pact to develop an EU-type process among Cana-da, Mexico, and the United States.

Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at Peter-son Institute for International Economics and a top promoter of NAFTA, TTIP, TPP, and the World Trade Organization, says Obama had good reasons for delaying his trade policy agenda. “This has been one of the quietest presidencies for trade policy since in the post [World War II] period,” Hufbauer told CNN in a September 12, 2012 interview. “He had other priorities, such as dealing with the Great Recession and health care. It takes a lot of capital to get trade deals through Congress, and it’s particularly tough to do when the econo-my is weak.”

Yes, pushing through ObamaCare, na-tionalizing the auto industry, bailing out Wall Street, and various and sundry other socialist nostrums occupied a great deal of Team Obama’s attention in the first four years. However, if the Obama ad-ministration failed to move fast enough and far enough on pushing through new trade agreements during its first term to suit some of the more fanatical globalist trade advocates, there is good reason to believe the White House will now be mov-ing trade pacts to the front burners.

In his televised State of the Union Ad-dress to Congress on February 12, 2013, President Obama declared:

To boost American exports, support American jobs and level the play-ing field in the growing markets of

AP

Imag

es

“new European soviet”: Former Soviet communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev, shown here addressing a conference in London, U.K., in 2005, referred to the EU as “the new European Soviet.”

THE NEW AMERICAN • MAy 20, 201312

globalism

With tariffs on trade between the United States and the European Union averaging just four percent, critics are asking why it is supposedly so urgent to put the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership on the fast track.

Asia, we intend to complete negotia-tions on a Trans-Pacific Partnership. And tonight, I’m announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union — because trade that is fair and free across the Atlantic supports millions of good-paying American jobs.

The tag line “millions of good-paying American jobs” was the cue for applause, and the congressional attendees responded on command. The weeks and months since the president’s address have seen a con-tinuous flurry of high-level activity — in both official and private circles — on the TPP and TTIP, though most of it has been below the general public’s radar.

On February 13, the day after his State of the Union address, President Obama joined European Council President Her-man Van Rompuy and European Com-mission President José Manuel Barroso in issuing a statement that announced:

We, the Leaders of the United States and the European Union, are pleased to announce that … the United States and the European Union will each ini-tiate the internal procedures necessary to launch negotiations on a Transatlan-tic Trade and Investment Partnership.

With tariffs on trade between the United States and the European Union averaging just four percent, critics are asking why it is supposedly so urgent to put the TTIP on the fast track. And why, if this is only a “trade” pact, are the negotiators includ-ing climate change, sustainable develop-ment, homeland security, military actions, the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, taxes, regulatory harmonization, and a passel of other issues in the agreement? The answer is that the TTIP has been crafted specifically to bring about U.S.-EU political and economic “integration” in the same manner that the nations of Eu-rope were integrated into the EU monster described by Bukovsky.

not idle speculationThis is not idle speculation; we have it on the direct authority of the TTIP authors. One of those authors was the late Warren Christopher, who served as secretary of state to President Clinton and was a for-eign policy advisor to President Obama.

In a speech entitled “Charting a Trans-atlantic Agenda for the 21st Century,” in Madrid, Spain, on June 2, 1995, Secretary Christopher declared: “The long term ob-jective is the integration of the economies of North America and Europe, consistent with the principles of the WTO.” This, he averred, “will align our efforts to promote

transatlantic integration with the forces of integration around the world.”

Secretary Christopher elaborated further:

The objective, as President Truman’s Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett said in 1948, “should con-tinue to be the progressively closer integration, both economic and po-litical, of presently free Europe, and eventually of as much of Europe as becomes free.”

The Robert Lovett to whom Christopher approvingly refers was also secretary of defense under Truman — and one of the six “Wise Men” of the private Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) who played major roles in bringing about the ascen-dency of the United Nations, Interna-tional Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other globalist institutions in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. The “progressively closer integration, both economic and political,” they envisioned would only be realized by a world government with plenary powers.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, in an ad-dress to Mikhail Gorbachev’s State of the World Forum in San Francisco in 1995, explained the importance of this progres-sive integration, in the context of the EU and other regional efforts. “We cannot leap into world government in one quick step,” said Brzezinski. “The precondition for genuine globalization is progressive regionalization.”

Professor Brzezinski, in addition to being a longtime leading member of the CFR, was also the designer hired by the then-chairman of the CFR, David Rock-efeller, to create the Trilateral Commission (TC) and to tutor and coach Jimmy Carter in carrying out CFR-TC policies.

The handprints of the CFR-TC “Wise Men” are all over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. One of the most important organizations pushing for passage of the TTIP is the Transatlantic Policy Network (TPN). The network’s EU honorary president is Peter Suther-land, who is also honorary EU chairman of the Trilateral Commission. Sutherland is also chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs International, as well as chairman of British Petroleum Company.

AP Images

“Eu monster”: Soviet-era dissident/author/scientist Vladimir Bukovsky (left) warns: “If you go through all the structures and features of this emerging European monster you will notice that it more and more resembles the Soviet Union.”

13Call 1-800-727-TRUE to subscribe today!

Goldman Sachs, of course, has benefited handsomely from its cozy relationship with the EU, as it has from its close ties to the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Re-serve. And undoubtedly, its billionaire, corporatist-socialist execs are looking forward to even more profitable bailouts and inside deals with the opportunities offered under the TTIP. Ditto for many of the other Wall Street cheerleaders for the TTIP and TPP.

The TPN’s U.S. honorary president for many years was Robert S. Strauss (CFR), founder of the insider law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, who served as Jimmy Carter’s trade representative, and later served in diplomatic roles under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. More recently, Strauss has been replaced by U.S. Senator Robert Bennett as TPN’s U.S. honorary president.

Former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) is a veteran CFR member and internation-alist and served as co-chairman of TPN in the 1990s. He also co-authored the 1998 TPN report Toward Transatlantic Part-nership, which called for harnessing “the growing collective powers of Europe to the long-established powers of the United States in a broadly based XXIst century transatlantic partnership.”

Hamilton and his co-authors continued:

Central to that vision is the TPN concept of “linkage,” by which we mean linking our growing political and economic interests with our long-standing common defence and security structures through a com-prehensive political framework. This will enable us to pursue our common global interests through

joint action exploiting the full range of political, economic and security instruments at our collec-tive disposal.

This “linkage” of politi-cal and economic interests through a “comprehensive political framework” is cen-tral to all of the efforts over the past several decades to craft a TTIP.

Team statsThe U.S. Chamber of Commerce has as its motto, “Standing Up for American En-terprise,” but it is clearly the large, multi-national corporations it is backing, not its hundreds of thousands of small and medi-um-sized member enterprises. The cham-ber itself has produced a study showing that federal regulations are already costing the U.S. economy an astronomical $1.9 trillion per year. This enormous burden is crushing many enterprises. The chamber would do well to put its members’ dues money, contributions, and political mus-cle to work rolling back the federal bu-reaucratic leviathan, rather than saddling its members with even more stifling EU regulations, which will surely follow if the TTIP is passed. But Thomas J. Dono-hue, the chamber’s president and CEO, is a CFR member and reliably toes the in-ternationalist line. So he is not likely to say or do anything that will contradict the corporate one-worlders who dominate the chamber’s leadership. After all, the Gulli-verian regulations actually help many of the big companies, effectively entrapping and wiping out their smaller competitors that don’t have the political connections or that can’t afford battalions of lawyers and accountants to deal with the regula-tions and regulators.

The man leading Team Obama’s trade offensive is Michael Froman, assistant to the president of the United States and deputy national security advisor for inter-national economic affairs. A Wall Street insider, Froman was a managing director at Citigroup, and also served as president and chief executive officer of CitiInsur-ance before joining the Obama adminis-tration. No doubt, his previous service in Brussels with the Forward Studies Unit of the European Commission also figured in his appointment, though to Americans in the know this entry on his résumé would be recognized as at least cause for con-cern, if not an outright negative.

Although virtually an unknown to the vast majority of Americans, Froman is definitely known in the higher circles of power that determine the economic and political fates of nations. Froman is not only a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the more exclusive Trilat-eral Commission, but also a member of that super-secret, super-elite annual gath-

AP Images

CFR vs. sovereignty: President of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard N. Haass (center and on large screen), speaking at the 2007 World Economic Forum, says that “states must be prepared to cede some sovereignty to world bodies.”

THE NEW AMERICAN • MAy 20, 201314

globalism

In a speech entitled “Charting a Transatlantic Agenda for the 21st Century,” in Madrid, Spain, on June 2, 1995, Secretary Christopher declared: “The long term objective is the integration of the economies of North America and Europe, consistent with the principles of the WTO.”

ering known as the Bilderberg Group. He is thus qualified to serve as the lead “Sherpa” guiding U.S. policy at the G7, G8, and G20 summits. And Froman’s fellow globalists in the CFR-dominated “mainstream” media could be counted on to ignore, cover up, or minimize his egre-gious corruption and conflicts of interest in the massive bailout of his employer (Citigroup) — which netted him $7.4 mil-lion, including a $2.25 million year-end bonus for 2008. In addition, Froman re-portedly played the central role in hiring New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner (CFR, TC) as Obama’s treasury secretary, even while Geithner was engineering the massive taxpayer bailout of Citigroup. And to make matters even more incestu-ously corrupt, Froman hired Jamie Rubin, the son of Citigroup CEO Robert Rubin (CFR, former Clinton treasury secretary, former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs), as a headhunter for the Obama transition team. Instead of spending time in prison for fraudulent mortgaged-backed “collat-eralized debt obligations” that enriched Citigroup and helped bring on the eco-nomic crisis, Rubin, Geithner, Froman, and company made off like bandits. Re-member this when Froman and Obama talk about “transparency” and the sup-posed benefits of TTIP.

On March 1, the Obama White House announced that it would be seeking “fast track” authority from Congress to complete trade pact negotiations. Formally known as Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), the con-troversial fast-track authorization enables the White House to team up with trade agreement advocates in Congress to rush pacts through with little or no congressio-nal or public debate. Under TPA rules, a trade pact must have an up-or-down vote in both House and Senate, without amend-ment, within 90 days of being submitted by the executive branch. It has proven to be very effective; Congress has never rejected a trade agreement that was submitted under fast-track rules.

But is TPA constitutional? That is the question that each and every member of Congress must answer, since each has

taken an oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives the power “to regu-late commerce with foreign nations” to the legislative, not the executive branch of government. Awarding TPA to the ex-ecutive branch cedes an enormous grant of power to regulate foreign commerce to the president. Moreover, as we’ve already learned from our experience with NAFTA, these multilateral trade agreements set up panels, tribunals, and agencies that claim authority to override our local, state, and federal laws — and even the Constitution.

During the battle over NAFTA, The New AmericAN published many articles warning that the agreement was designed to emulate the subversive EU process and represented a clear attack on our nation’s sovereignty. After NAFTA passed Con-gress, some of its proponents publicly con-firmed these charges. One such was New York Times writer William Orme, Jr., a NAFTA supporter who has penned articles for the CFR’s journal Foreign Affairs. He is also the author of the pro-NAFTA book Continental Shift: Free Trade and the New North America. In an article for the Wash-ington Post adapted from that book, Orme pointed out that when NAFTA was first proposed, “critics in all three countries

claimed that its hidden agenda was the de-velopment of a European-style common market.” The critics were absolutely right, Orme admitted, though they were treated as lunatics by the establishment punditry and the leadership of both the Democrat and Republican parties for stating the ob-vious. Orme continued:

Didn’t Europe also start out with a limited free trade area? And, given the Brussels precedent, wouldn’t this mean ceding some measure of sov-ereignty to unelected bureaucrats? Even worse, would this lead to lib-eralization and collaborative policy making in many other sensitive areas, from monetary policy and immigra-tion to labor and environmental law?

NAFTA’s defenders said no. They argued that the agreement is designed to dismantle trade barriers, not build a new regulatory bureaucracy. NAFTA, declared one congressional backer, “is a trade agreement, not an act of economic union.”

Yet the critics were essentially right. NAFTA lays the foundation for a continental common market, as many of its architects privately acknowledge. Part of this founda-

AP

Imag

es

usurping national powers: The Berlaymont Building, headquarters of the European Commission, the EU executive that is taking increasing control over the European nations

www.TheNewAmerican.com 15

tion, inevitably, is bureaucratic: The agreement creates a variety of con-tinental institutions — ranging from trade dispute panels to labor and en-vironmental commissions — that are, in aggregate, an embryonic NAFTA government.

Andrew Reding of the World Policy Insti-tute is another avid internationalist who has publicly admitted that the “trade” side of NAFTA masks the real nature of NAFTA and other trade pacts. “With economic integration will come political integration,” said Reding, in an article he wrote for the Ottawa Citizen in September 1992. Reding went further, noting:

One of the purposes of NAFTA and other international trade agreements is to set the principles by which such decisions are to be made, including the critical question of how to “har-monize” differing labor, consumer, environmental, and other standards.

By whatever name, this is an incipi-ent form of international government.

Acknowledging that this form of bu-reaucratic “administrative law” is anti-democratic, Reding poses a solution: an EU-style parliament. “Following the lead of the Europeans,” said Reding, “North Americans should begin considering for-mation of a continental parliament.” Yes,

then we too can have a Supreme Soviet masquerading as a parliament, as Bu-kovsky has aptly described the EU legis-lative charade. We can expect to hear more calls for such a continental parliament, as the “democratic deficit” of NAFTA and CAFTA become more obvious.

malignant, not benignBut for now, as during the run-up for NAFTA and CAFTA, the CFR crowd pre-fers, in the main, to insist to the American public that the TPP and TTIP are simply about dramatically expanding our economy and creating “millions of good-paying jobs” — promises that even many of the NAFTA-CAFTA advocates now admit never materi-alized, though millions of good-paying jobs did leave the country as a result.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of reveal-ing admissions that belie the stated benign objectives of the TPP/TTIP lobby. On Feb-ruary 12, 2013, the same day as President Obama’s State of the Union announce-ment on trade, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Global Governance Program hosted a panel on “The G20: Prospects and Challenges for Global Governance,” featuring some of the CFR’s lead-ing lights, includ-ing Ian Bremmer, president of the Eur-

asia Group; CFR Senior Fellow Stewart M. Patrick; and Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University. Among the noteworthy comments by the participants was this approving statement by Ian Bremmer: “The EU is much more significant. There’s real subversion of sov-ereignty by the EU that works.” The panel-ists all agreed, apparently, that the EU is indeed engaged in the “real subversion of sovereignty” — and, it appears, all of them believe that is a good thing.

That is not surprising. In a 2006 op-ed entitled, “State sovereignty must be altered in globalized era,” CFR President Rich-ard Haass declared that we must “rethink” and “redefine” sovereignty because “new mechanisms are needed for regional and global governance” and “states must be prepared to cede some sovereignty to world bodies.” Due to globalization, said Haass, “sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but ... it needs to become weak-er.” According to the CFR chief, we must choose between “an international system of either world government or anarchy.”

President Obama is calling on Con-gress to provide him the TPA fast track with the announced intention of passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership by Decem-ber 31 of this year, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership fol-lowing thereafter. An imposing lineup of corporate, banking, and union lobbyists is jumping aboard the trade bandwagon again. However, the same held true when President George W. Bush tried to ram the sovereignty-destroying Free Trade Area of the Americas, the Security and Prosperity Partnership, and the NAFTA Super High-way down America’s throat. But an awak-ened and energized patriot coalition shot down these massively funded operations. The same constitutionalist forces are now organizing again to shoot down Trade Pro-motion Authority in Congress, and along with it the Trans-Pacific and Transatlantic so-called partnerships. n

u.s.-Eu convergence: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (CFR), left, speaks as EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso listens on April 22, 2013, in Brussels, Belgium.

AP Images

16

globalism

EXTRa CopiEs aVailablEAdditional copies of this issue of The

New AmericAN are available at quantity-discount prices. To place your order, visit www.shopjbs.org or see the card between pages 34-35.

➧

THE NEW AMERICAN • MAy 20, 2013

by Thomas R. Eddlem

W hen Georgia joined the Con-federacy and seceded from the union on January 29, 1861, a

state convention explained the state’s rea-sons for separation. Georgia singled out Wisconsin’s Supreme Court for particular excoriation because this court had the te-merity to declare null and void within the

state of Wisconsin the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This constitutionally valid federal law — a part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern states where slavery was legal and Northern states where it was not — required that runaway slaves, upon capture, be returned to their masters. The subsequent U.S. Supreme Court unani-mously upheld the constitutionality of this law, overturning the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision, the Georgia convention noted. Not only that, but Wisconsin’s “own local courts with equal unanimity (with the single and temporary exception of the supreme court of Wisconsin), sustained its constitutionality in all of its provisions.”

The only factually inaccurate part of Georgia’s declaration was the word “tem-porary.” To this day, Wisconsin courts have refused to recognize the U.S. Supreme Court decision Ableman v. Booth as legiti-mate or binding on state courts. That 1859 U.S. Supreme Court decision claimed to overrule the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s 1854 decision In Re: Booth, which de-clared the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional. According to the Wisconsin court system today, “The U.S. Supreme Court overturned that decision but the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to file the U.S. Court’s mandate upholding the fugitive slave law. That mandate has never been filed.” The Wisconsin decision on the Fugitive Slave Act is the one in-stance of successful state judicial nullifica-tion of federal law that still stands in a state.

The Booth cases brought into focus two of the key issues of the day: Whether the U.S. Constitution was a confedera-tion of states that permanently protected slavery or a freedom document that tem-porarily recognized slavery as a legacy of colonial times, and whether the U.S. Supreme Court was, or the states were, the final arbiter of infringements of the U.S. Constitution.

In 1854, Wisconsin rejected the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which mandated Northern states return Southern slaves, demonstrating both the validity and usefulness of nullification.

Nullification:Ableman v. Booth and the Nature of the U.S. Constitution

His name lives on: Sherman Booth, the publisher of an abolitionist newspaper, became famous when he riled up an anti-slavery crowd prior to them freeing an imprisoned runaway slave. He was subsequently arrested for violating the federal Fugitive Slave Act.

THE NEW AMERICAN • MAy 20, 201334

— past anD perspeCtiVeHistorYHistorY

The Booth Controversy The Booth controversy began when Wis-consin abolitionist Sherman Booth pub-lished editorials in his newspaper and made public speeches to help liberate escaped Missouri slave Joshua Glover from a Wisconsin jail in 1854. Booth was later prosecuted under the federal Fugi-tive Slave Act of 1850 for “aiding and abetting” the escape of Glover, who fled to freedom in Canada after a mob sympa-thetic to Glover broke down the door of the Milwaukee jail where he was detained.

Booth himself turned out to be a less-than-sympathetic historical figure, later standing trial for seducing the underage babysitter of his children. Though the jury acquitted him, his wife didn’t believe him and divorced him. But the case he created, nevertheless, continues to create ripples throughout American history.

Though Booth did not personally partic-ipate in the assault on the jail where Glover was being held, he touted it in his newspa-per and incited a crowd in a public speech that set the mob upon the jail. Booth’s at-torney appealed to the state courts with a habeas corpus petition, charging that U.S. Marshall Stephen Ableman had illegally and unconstitutionally imprisoned him within the territorial boundaries of the state of Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Su-preme Court granted Booth’s habeas pe-tition in 1854, and unanimously declared the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 null and void because it unconstitutionally federal-ized slave-catching.

The Wisconsin decision cheered aboli-tionists across the nation, with Massachu-setts Senator Charles Sumner leading the praise of the Wisconsin court. “This very act is an assumption by Congress of power not delegated to it under the Constitution, and an infraction of rights secured to the States,” the Republican argued in a Senate speech February 23, 1855.

Show me, Sir, if you can, the clause, sentence, or word, in the Constitu-tion, which gives to Congress any power to legislate on the subject. I challenge honorable Senators to pro-duce it. I fearlessly assert it cannot be done. The obligations imposed by the “fugitive” clause, whatever they may be, rest upon the States, and not upon Congress.... And now, almost while

I speak, comes the solemn judgment of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin — a sovereign State of this Union — made after elaborate argument, on successive occasions, before a single Judge, and then before the whole bench, declaring this act to be a vio-lation of the Constitution.

Whereas Article I of the Constitution ex-plains the powers of Congress, Article IV of the Constitution explains the ob-ligation of states. Article IV, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution charges states with catching slaves and other fugitives that had escaped from other states, and returning them:

A person charged in any state with treason, felony, or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state, shall on demand of the executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the state having ju-risdiction of the crime.

No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in con-sequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such ser-vice or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.

Thus, when the Congress took up the issue in 1793, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 simply claimed, “It shall be the duty of the executive authority of the state or territory to which such person shall have fled, to cause him or her to be arrested and secured,” and gave slave owners and their slave catchers a cause in federal court to arrange the return of their slaves to the state where they were originally held in slavery.

The State of the StatesBy the time the U.S. Constitution had been adopted, nearly all of the Northern states had passed laws guaranteeing an eventual abolition of slavery. Vermont banned slavery in 1777, during the War for Independence and before it was even a state. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania had already passed laws on gradual abolition before the 1787 con-stitutional convention. New Hampshire didn’t bother with abolishing slavery since nearly all of its slaves were eman-cipated after serving in the Continental Army during the War for Independence. By 1810, the U.S. Census recorded no slaves in New Hampshire. New York and New Jersey passed gradual abolition laws in 1799 and 1804, respectively. Massa-chusetts courts proclaimed all slaves free in the 1784 Quock Walker cases, saying that the 1780 state constitution written

Wisconsin Historical Society

defending states against federal usurpation: Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Abram D. Smith defended the rights of states to maintain their own laws in the case of In Re: Booth, asserting the federal government cannot abuse the U.S. Constitution with impunity. His defiance of the unconstitutional federal law — a process called nullification — still stands in the Wisconsin judicial system.

www.TheNewAmerican.com 35

by John Adams freed slaves, proclaiming that “all men are born free and equal.”

In Commonwealth v. Jennison, slave Quock Walker applied for his freedom, and the state of Massachusetts charged his former master, Nathaniel Jennison, with criminal battery for beating Walker and trying to return him to slavery. Jennison was convicted of criminal battery, and Walker was freed in the criminal case. A separate jury in a civil suit said Jennison had to grant financial damages to Walker for the beating. Massachusetts Chief Jus-tice William Cushing — later nominated to serve on the first U.S. Supreme Court by George Washington — summed up the at-titude of the American Revolution toward slavery in his instructions to the jury in the 1784 Commonwealth v. Jennison case:

As to the doctrine of slavery and the

right of Christians to hold Africans in perpetual ser-vitude, and sell and treat them as we do our horses and cattle, that (it is true) has been heretofore coun-tenanced by the Province Laws formerly, but no-where is it expressly en-acted or established. It has been a usage — a usage which took its origin from the practice of some of the

European nations, and the regulations of British government respecting the then Colonies, for the benefit of trade and wealth. But whatever sentiments have formerly prevailed in this partic-ular or slid in upon us by the example of others, a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and to that natural, innate desire of Liberty, with which Heaven (without regard to color, complex-ion, or shape of noses-features) has inspired all the human race. And upon this ground our Constitution of Government, by which the people of this Commonwealth have solemnly bound themselves, sets out with de-claring that “all men are born free and equal” — and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it

guarded by the laws, as well as life and property — and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves. This being the case, I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitu-tion; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature, unless his liberty is forfeited by some criminal conduct or given up by personal consent or contract.

Despite this new attitude toward freedom and against slavery after the American Revolution, Northern states regularly en-forced the first fugitive slave law for about 40 years after adoption of the U.S. Consti-tution. But by the 1830s, Northern states had gradually tired of returning slaves to captivity. A few state governments showed open hostility to the fugitive slave clause, and Southern states demanded a more ef-fective mechanism for the return of their citizens’ “property” as the Underground Railroad ramped up.

Countrywide CompromiseThe result of that constitutional impasse — where Southern states refused to honor humanity and abolish slavery, while Northern states refused to honor their con-stitutional obligations to return fugitive slaves — was the Compromise of 1850, which involved multiple compromises: It

continued the Missouri Com-promise (which decided slavery would be prohibited in most Western territories); banned the slave trade but not slavery itself in Washington, D.C.; settled a dispute over the Texas border; granted statehood to California as a free state; and passed the new fugitive slave law.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 changed the old constitu-tional arrangement completely. Instead of states enforcing the fugitive slave clause, as consti-tutionally required, the 1850 law made all federal officials slave catchers, criminalized federal officials if they did not actively collect slaves, and bribed those federal officials with a $5 bounty for every slave they found ($400 in today’s money). Those alleged

abolitionist conspirators: While the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 violated the U.S. Constitution by federalizing slave catching and violating the Bill of Rights, abolitionist organizers in Boston and elsewhere used printed broadsides to organize illegal assaults on federal jails to provoke a federal response.

36 THE NEW AMERICAN • MAy 20, 2013

By the 1830s, Northern states had gradually tired of returning slaves to captivity. A few state governments showed open hostility to the fugitive slave clause, and Southern states demanded a more effective mechanism for the return of their citizens’ “property.”

— past anD perspeCtiVeHistorYHistorY

to be escaped slaves were returned without a habeas corpus hearing or trial by jury. Non-judicial federal commissioners were charged with determining the return of al-leged slaves, and the accused were prohib-ited from testifying upon their own behalf.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 un-constitutional in the case of In Re: Booth, according to the court, “because it does not provide for a trial by jury of the fact that the alleged fugitive owes service to the claimant by the laws of another State, and of his escape therefrom,” because it unconstitutionally conferred on federal commissioners judicial powers, because it denied fugitive slaves due process (“any person alleged to be a fugitive may be ar-rested and deprived of his liberty ‘without due process of law’”), and because “Con-gress has no constitutional power to legis-late on that subject.” The Wisconsin court noted: “We are aware that it has been said that slaves are not persons in the sense in which that term is used in the amendment to the Constitution above referenced to [the rights to due process and trial by jury guaranteed by the Fifth and Sixth Amend-ments]. But this, admitting it to be true, does not affect the question under consid-eration, as persons who are free are liable to be arrested and deprived of their liberty by virtue of this act, without having had a trial by a jury of their peers.”

The kidnapping of free black men and

women was no straw-man argument by the Wisconsin justices. Kidnapping free blacks had been a fairly common practice, and one that had received treatment in the U.S. Supreme Court a decade earlier in the 1841 Amistad decision.

In the Amistad case, a group of Af-ricans had been illegally kidnapped in Africa by Portuguese pirates and sold to Spanish slave-masters in Havana. Since Spain, Portugal, and the United States had all abolished the international slave trade a generation before the 1839 kid-napping, the act was clearly illegal. The black slaves rebelled on a transport trip to Santo Domingo, and eventually ran their ship — the Amistad — aground on Long Island, New York. The Spanish embassy demanded the return of the slaves to their politically connected Spanish citizens. But U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Joseph Story (ironically, a Massachusetts man who served as Cushing’s replacement on the latter’s retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court) proclaimed that “these negroes are not slaves, but are kidnapped Africans, who, by the laws of Spain itself, are entitled to their freedom, and were kidnapped and illegally carried to Cuba, and illegally detained and restrained on board the Amistad.” Interestingly, Chief Justice Roger Taney — who later ruled in the Dred Scott case that a black man, even a free black man, can never have access to federal courts — signed on to Story’s

opinion in the Amistad case granting the Africans their day in court, a court that in-cluded full jury trial.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court had sim-ply ruled in its Booth case, In Re: Booth, that free black men should have their day in court, as required by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, Justice Abram D. Smith ob-served for the Wisconsin court that under the Fugitive Slave Act “the rights, inter-ests, feelings, dignity, sovereignty, of the free States are as nothing, while the mere pecuniary interests of the slaveholder are everything.”

Southern states explicitly referred to Northern nullification efforts against the Fugitive Slave Act as their primary reason for secession in 1860-61. In its “Declara-tion of the Immediate Causes Which In-duce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” South Carolina complained:

The States of Maine, New Hamp-shire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Con-necticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render use-less any attempt to execute them.... They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.... This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens.

Every other state that published an official declaration of the reasons for secession — Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas — also focused upon nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act as their main reason for seced-ing. And while Georgia and Texas men-tioned other grievances against the North in addition to the fugitive slave issue, such as the tariff and lack of aid in fighting Indi-an tribes, South Carolina and Mississippi limited their complaint to nullification of fugitive slave laws alone.

The Southern complaints about nullifi-

37Call 1-800-727-TRUE to subscribe today!

Charles sumner: Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner, a militant abolitionist, took note of the unconstitutional nature of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and Wisconsin’s resistance to that law in the Booth case.

cation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 were accurate. Each Northern state found its own way to make the federal law in-effectual. The Vermont legislature nulli-fied the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 within weeks of its enactment, passing its own “Habeas Corpus Law” in November 1850, which required extensive habeas corpus hearings for fugitive slaves and a jury trial before extradition, and essentially banned state officials from cooperating with the anti-habeas Fugitive Slave Act.

In Massachusetts, members of the radi-cal Boston Vigilance Committee liberat-ed fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins from a federal jail, and U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster — a former U.S. sena-tor from Massachusetts — was unable to obtain a single conviction under the Fu-gitive Slave Act of 1850 after the perpe-trators were caught. Webster personally led one of the prosecutions, but public sentiment in New England against slav-ery was so strong that jury nullification became commonplace on slavery issues.

Most other Northern states passed “Personal Liberty Laws” that exempted state and local officials — as well as ordinary citizens — from liability when helping es-caped slaves.

Justice JudgmentsU.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled in his written opinion for the court in the 1859 Ableman v. Booth case that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was constitutional because of the “necessary and proper” clause of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, but — tellingly — he neglected to cite the underlying fed-eral power it was “necessary and proper” to legislate upon.

Of course, Taney had explained why he believed that African-Americans needed no protection of habeas corpus or trial by jury three years earlier in the Dred Scott decision. In that 1856 case, he ruled that even free black men can have no access to courts or trials in the United States. Taney revealed an entirely different idea of the language about all men being “created equal” in the Declaration of Independence in the Dred Scott decision:

The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used

in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration, for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly in-consistent with the principles they asserted, and instead of the sym-pathy of mankind to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received univer-sal rebuke and reprobation.

Taney held in Dred Scott of all black men, “He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race.... And, accordingly, a negro of the African race was regarded by them as an article of property, and held, and bought and sold as such, in every one of the thirteen colonies which united in the Declaration of Indepen-dence and afterwards formed the Constitu-tion of the United States.”

Taney’s assertion in Dred Scott that no state allowed black people the vote and full citizenship was demonstrably false. Massachusetts’ Quock Walker cases, which abolished slavery four years be-fore the Constitution took effect, proved his statement untrue. Quock Walker had access to the courts, and had gained full citizenship rights — including the right to vote. And — as mentioned above — most of the other Northern states had already set upon the path toward abol-ishing slavery at the time of adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Some other New England states had also allowed African-Americans the right to vote at the time of adoption of the U.S. Constitution, a fact emphasized by Associate Justice Benja-min Curtis in his dissent.

Taney’s words in Dred Scott were nev-ertheless echoed by the seceding South-ern states seven years later, when Texas claimed in its declaration of the causes of secession that the Constitution was “es-tablished exclusively by the white race,

Flight to freedom: This street corner in Milwaukee was once the site of the courthouse where runaway slave Joshua Glover was jailed. A mob of some 5,000, inspired by Sherman Booth, broke into the jail and set him free. Glover escaped by sailing up Lake Michigan to freedom in Canada.

Southern states explicitly referred to Northern nullification efforts against the Fugitive Slave Act as their primary reason for secession in 1860-61.

— past anD perspeCtiVeHistorYHistorY

38 THE NEW AMERICAN • MAy 20, 2013

for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their estab-lishment” and “that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free.”

Taney claimed in Ableman v. Booth that states had no right to oppose even un-constitutional laws, claiming instead that the Supreme Court alone had the power to declare a statute enacted by Congress unconstitutional:

The sovereignty to be created was to be limited in its powers of legislation, and if it passed a law not authorized by its enumerated powers, it was not to be regarded as the supreme law of the land, nor were the State judges bound to carry it into execution. And as the courts of a State, and the courts of the United States, might, and in-deed certainly would, often differ as to the extent of the powers conferred by the General Government, it was manifest that serious controversies would arise between the authorities of the United States and of the States, which must be settled by force of arms, unless some tribunal was creat-ed to decide between them finally and with out appeal. The Constitution has accordingly provided, as far as human foresight could provide, against this danger. And in conferring judicial power upon the Federal Government, it declares that the jurisdiction of its courts shall extend to all cases aris-ing under “this Constitution” and the laws of the United States — leaving out the words of restriction contained in the grant of legislative power which we have above noticed. The judicial power covers every legislative act of Congress, whether it be made within the limits of its delegated powers, or be an assumption of power beyond the grants in the Constitution.

Of course, even though the Supreme Court is granted jurisdiction to declare laws un-constitutional, nowhere in the Constitution is this jurisdiction explicitly declared to be exclusive. This explains why the Consti-tution’s primary author, James Madison, along with Thomas Jefferson, authored the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions in 1798. Those resolutions asserted that states were

the ultimate authority in determining the constitutionality of a law passed by Con-gress, the latter document noting of the U.S. Constitution that “the several states who formed that instrument, being sov-ereign and independent, have the unques-tionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under colour of that instrument, is the rightful remedy.”

Moreover, nowhere does the Constitu-tion require states or individuals to fol-low unconstitutional laws until such time as they are declared unconstitutional by federal courts. Thus, Wisconsin Justice Abram Smith responded for the State of Wisconsin in Ableman that he would never accept as a reality that

an officer of the United States, armed with process to arrest a fugitive from service, is clothed with entire immu-nity from state authority; to commit whatever crime or outrage against the laws of the state; that their own high prerogative writ of habeas cor-pus shall be annulled, their author-ity defied, their officers resisted, the process of their own courts con-temned, their territory invaded by federal force, the houses of their citi-zens searched, the sanctuary or their homes invaded, their streets and pub-lic places made the scenes of tumul-

tuous and armed violence, and state sovereignty succumb — paralyzed and aghast — before the process of an officer unknown to the constitution and irresponsible to its sanctions. At least, such shall not become the deg-radation of Wisconsin, without meet-ing as stern remonstrance and resis-tance as I may be able to interpose, so long as her people impose upon me the duty of guarding their rights and liberties, and maintaining the dignity and sovereignty of their state.

At issue in the Ableman v. Booth case was the very nature of the U.S. Constitution. Was the U.S. Constitution a confedera-tion created by the states, who ratified the document and were the ultimate judges of infractions of its provisions? Or was the United States a nation where states were mere provinces in a consolidated govern-ment and where courts alone could pro-vide a check against a runaway Congress?

While many Americans will assert that the states’ right to judge infractions of the U.S. Constitution was decided by the American Civil War, Wisconsin and its Supreme Court remain the one Northern state that asserts that radically different vision of America. And the Wisconsin court’s vision was clearly enunciated 55 years earlier by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. n

all women are equal too: Before the 1784 Quock Walker cases, Massachusetts slave Elizabeth Freeman sued for her freedom under John Adams’ state constitution that said “all men are born free and equal.” Her lawyer Theodore Sedgwick (right), later a Federalist congressman, successfully argued in 1781 that Freeman should be liberated.

39www.TheNewAmerican.com

With the recent saber rattling out of North Korea, it is

wise to discuss who can take the nation into a conflict, and what limitations — if any — exist on the president’s role as “commander in chief.”

Barack Obama isn’t the first occupant of the Oval Office who has delighted in being referred to as “com-mander in chief.” Like his recent predecessors, both Republican and Democrat, he would have the American people — even the rest of the world — believe that he pos-sesses unquestionable author-ity to unleash our nation’s powerful military forces at his sole discretion. And he has done so, for example, by deciding to take military action in Libya. But the fact that he is following in the footsteps of previous presidents does not necessarily mean that he is operating within the boundaries of the Constitution that he and his predecessors have taken an oath to uphold.

The “commander in chief” title appears in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, which states: “The President shall be Com-mander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.” This means simply that the president is chief commander of U.S. military forces, including the militia “when called into the actual service of the United States.” It confers no war-making power, as is made clear by Ar-ticle I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which assigns to Congress the power to “declare war.” And the same section also gives Congress the powers to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal,” “Make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water,” “Raise and Support Armies,” “provide and maintain a Navy,” “make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces,” and “provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel invasions.”

In The Federalist, No. 69, Alexander Hamilton notes that the authority of the president as commander in chief amounts “to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first General and admiral of the Confederacy.” By contrast, Hamilton adds, the authority of “the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies — all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.” (Emphasis in original.) Put simply, the president is not a king — though presidents have been allowed to act as if they were kings.

Usurping the war-making powers of Congress, presi-dents have time and again plunged the country into the crucible of war without the required congressional decla-ration. The last time Congress declared war occurred imme-diately after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. No congressional dec-larations were issued for any subsequent military conflicts including Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. But no one doubts that these were wars. How did this happen?

The answer begins with U.S. entry into the United Nations on July 28, 1945, followed by enactment of the little-known United Nations Participation Act (UNPA) on December 20, 1945. The United Nations Charter’s Article 25 states: “The Members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.” That any senator would agree to that seems hard to believe, but 89 did. Then, UNPA’s Section 6 states: “The President shall not be deemed to require the authorization of Congress” to send American forces to carry out the decisions of the UN’s Security Council. Here is where expansions of the role of commander in chief began. America’s wars since 1945 have been fought under authorization suppos-edly supplied by the UN or its subsidiaries — NATO and (the now-defunct) SEATO.

What should any American do about all of this? The obvi-ous answer begins with demanding that our nation withdraw from the United Nations. Repeal of the United Nations Partici-pation Act must follow. Both of these goals can be achieved through passage of Georgia Congressman Paul Broun’s H.R. 75 currently before the House of Representatives. Americans who don’t want a president to send our forces into another un-declared war should contact their congressman and urge support for H.R. 75. Clipping the president’s ill-gotten wings via pas-sage of this measure will keep our nation out of more wars, slow down fraudulent reliance on the role of commander in chief, even repeal the United Nations Participation Act.

Whoever resides in the White House is not supposed to be an all-powerful ruler who can create war, send forces to fight and die without congressional authorization, and centralize govern-ment power over the entire nation. Obviously, the limited mean-ing of the designation “commander in chief” must become better known by all Americans who value freedom for themselves and independence for our nation. n

The Role of commander in chief

44 THE NEW AMERICAN • MAy 20, 2013

THE lasT WoRdTHE LAST WORDBy JohN F. mcmANuS

AP Images